"I find it chilling that Scott Morrison [Australian Immigration Minister] is effectively wanting to use people as hostages here. He chose to not do the processing and now saying unless we vote for his measures, then he'll continue to keep people in detention," Tony Burke, senior opposition figure and former immigration minister of Australia said in an interview with ABC radio.
The Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) bill seeks to expand the immigration minister's powers in dealing with some 30,000 illegal migrants that arrived in Australia from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Iran in recent years by boat and are now being processed in detention centers in Papua New Guinea or Nauru, with which Australia has agreements.
To win Senate support, Morrison announced a number of compromises. The minister said that if the bill is passed, some 1,500 people, including 460 children that arrived in Australia in the second half of 2013, will be included in the existing caseload instead of being sent to a detention center on the Pacific island of Nauru. He also had agreed to increase refugee and asylum seeker intake from 13,750 to 18,750 people a year by 2020 at a cost to the Government of more than $100 million dollars. He also promised to allow asylum seekers with visas to leave the country for compassionate reasons and return, if they are not traveling to the place where they claim they were persecuted.
According to BBC, the Australian government said Thursday it would propose that the Senate sits late on Thursday night and possibly on Friday to deal with 10 bills it still must bring to vote, including the proposed migration bill.
